Conference Agenda

This paper reviews sixteen residential schemes that represent the range of urban typologies encountered around London, UK. Fieldwork and detailed analytical studies conducted on each scheme provided insights on environmental performance and the connections between type, architectural design and performance. The study demonstrates the potential for passive design to lead to free-running buildings that do not require conventional space heating while also highlighting an increasing problem with overheating that is affecting smaller, highly insulated dwellings of recent construction.

This paper presents a prototype classroom-field interactive teaching and research tool, named Interactive Satellite Solar Lab (ISSL) that transcends the physical boundary of conventional classrooms and expands the venue of teaching and learning to out-of-doors. Tethered wirelessly to the classroom, the satellite lab empowers students to examine real-time performance of solar systems in real world settings. While experiments are conducted in remote settings by a team of students, their experiments and collected data are communicated instantly to the classroom instructor and students. The visual images and collected data from field experiments are simulcast in the classroom where the instructor and other students are viewing them. The data gathered from the field are transmitted to the instructor’s and students’ PCs or cellular phones. Activities of onsite experiments can be recorded and projected in the classroom. The field team and the classroom students are able to assess field conditions, make decisions, and perform experiments together. The ISSL was developed by a multidisciplinary team of faculty and students in an effort to transform the environmental dimension of architectural education, and to explore and promote a next generation pedagogic paradigm for science and engineering.

The goal of this study is to investigate the academic efforts to apply Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in architectural design. CFD refers to a computational method for predicting the movement of fluid. Since airflow is an important issue in architecture, CFD can be a helpful tool in architectural design. Specifically, the benefit of using CFD can be maximized if it can be used from the beginning of the design process. However, the complexity of CFD has been a barrier to be utilized in the early stages of design. Although the development of new software made CFD more accessible for architectural designers, it caused another problem of blind users who cannot interpret the simulation results. With a qualitative and interview-based research method, this study explores the current position of CFD in architectural design education. Former instructors and students of two CFD courses offered at two design-oriented architecture programs in the US participated in the interviews. Through the interviews, this study questions the future direction of CFD for architectural design education.

For the complex smart systems of the future, you need highly educated engineers to design systems which not only carry out their needed functionality but also are low power, which in turn benefits all people. Learning hardware modelling with a hardware modelling language like VHDL is an extensive undertaking, which involves practice by solving many assignments independently. Providing an adequate learning experience is a difficult task due to large classes and different types of learners. This paper presents the VHDL E-Learning System, an automated assessment system to give students tasks and automated feedback and therefore provides students the possibility to increasingly build up their proficiency in designing digital systems.